So there I was in my hotel room on the outskirts of Paris, shortly before I was scheduled to meet a dear Parisian friend for dinner. And I had the email with my diagnosis, bonging the big bell of mortality over and over.

The first thought that occurred to me, and which probably occurs to most people who are confronted with a cancer diagnosis, was “Am I going to die?”

And of course, the answer is: “You didn’t know that already?”

In fact, it wasn’t much of a big deal. I’m as unorthodox at Buddhist practice as I am about everything else, but I do meditate, albeit briefly, nearly every day. And while my practice has nothing to do with fixating on my death, observing the arising and passing away of my own thoughts has obvious implications: thoughts come and go; so does everything else; that includes me. And neither is this the first or the ten thousandth time that I’ve stopped to think whether the life course I am trying to navigate is worthy of a being who is destined to disappear one day.

The words that came into my head were unmistakably in the voice of my late great crazy professor mentor saddhu Jim Webb. He was 12 years older than me, and he arrived as a professor at Reed College in 1964 at the same time I arrived as an undergraduate. What happened next is another story; suffice it to say here and now that Jim managed to get himself denied tenure in a spectacular way. I’m not kidding about the next part — then he had his disciples (I was a student and friend, not a disciple) drive him to a deserted Mexican beach, strip and oil him, clothe him in feathers and turquoise, then set him off on a raft into the sunset. They filmed it. Some day, Spider God, the brilliant little film that our friend the late Will Baker made about the Webb saga will be available online.

Jim came from a tiny town in New Mexico where it meets Texas and Mexico. He went off to Harvard, graduated summa cum laude, was a brilliant Fullbright scholar, and came back to Portland, Oregon to flame out at a small but intense liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest. After that, he retired to his parent’s ranch and never did anything he didn’t want to do ever again. Every year, he would visit Judy and I and eventually Mamie in San Francisco. He taught us bridge and did zen things like arranging the Fall liquidambar leaves in our yard in a spectrum, clipping them together with paper clips from my office. He visited for decades, until his death about 5 years ago. There’s a point to this story.

Jim and I were fans of the crazy Buddhist poet Han Shan. “Han Shan” means “Cold Mountain,” which is also the name of the place where he lived and were he left his poems written on rocks. Gary Snyder (the fact that Snyder had gone to Reed was all I needed to know to decide to go there) translated the poems, and a Reedie, Michael McPherson, calligraphed them in an italic hand. (Here is the collection of Han Shan’s poems in its entirety).

A year or two after Jim died, I picked up my copy of “Cold Mountain Poems,” and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. It was a page from an old bridge scoring pad, and on it was a short quote from a Tibetan sage, in Jim’s hand. Jim and I had the privilege of studying briefly with the late Lloyd Reynolds; if you ever watch a video of Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford (probably one of the best graduation speeches ever), you will learn that dropping out of Reed but continuing to take Lloyd Reynolds’ classes convinced Jobs that computer typefaces should be beautiful.

Here’s the scan of the piece of paper that fell out of Cold Mountain Poems: